Why Toronto could use a little Seoul

In an occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we look at Seoul’s success with reclaiming and restoring hidden waterways.

Correcting public infrastructure blunders made more than 100 years ago doesn’t sound glamorous; it definitely doesn’t make for a rousing political platform. If a councillor wanted to spend public money digging up a creek that was unnecessarily buried in 1880, the idea would almost certainly get shot down. After all, when Torontonians think about how to improve our urban spaces, attention is paid to what we can see — roads, buildings, bridges — not what’s below the surface.
It’s unfortunate, though, because digging up our buried waterways — a trend known as “daylighting” — is gaining a lot of traction in cities around the world, and Toronto shouldn’t let itself get left behind.

The most compelling example is the Cheong Gye Cheon river in Seoul, South Korea. In 1940, the 5.8-kilometre stretch of river, which runs through the capital city’s downtown core, was filled in by the Japanese government and covered with asphalt to form the base of a highway. Later, beginning in 1968, a second highway was built overtop, resembling Toronto’s Lakeshore-and-Gardiner piggyback configuration. Until 2005, this corridor carried more than 100,000 people to and fro each day.

About a decade ago, the Korean rags-to-riches sensation Lee Myung-bak ran for mayor of Seoul and won. A central part of his election platform was the resurrection of the Cheong Gye Cheon river. On his first day in office, he began assembling the plans to get this project underway. Dr. Lee In Keun, currently assistant mayor of infrastructure for the city, remembers this time vividly.
“The entire process took only 27 months,” he says. “We worked very fast, around the clock, removing little bits of the highway piece by piece until the river came back.”

He makes it sound easy — and in some respects it was, in that the process literally just involved removing chunks of road and digging up a river that already existed. But of course, there were challenges along the way, especially the problem of diverting traffic.

“Everyone was worried about that,” Lee says. “But the advantage was Seoul had been building a subway network since the 1970s and we’d expanded it to eight lines by 2000. So by the time the river project was underway, we had enough public transit to alleviate congestion. We also introduced various new policies, such as reserved lanes and mandating that people only drive on certain days.”

As well, Seoul’s population had begun to stabilize by the early ’90s at around 10 million people and, in turn, its rate of development was slowing down. This meant the city’s government needed to shift its focus, prioritizing “restoration and sustainability,” as Lee says, rather than building more stuff.

At a total cost of $380-million, paid entirely by the city, the river project was considered a huge success and received international media attention — Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has since published a book about it called Deconstruction/Construction. The resuscitated Cheong Gye Cheon improved local air quality, reduced noise pollution, attracted a variety of birds, insects and fish back into the area, became a gathering point for community events and increased surrounding property values. The visionary behind this project, Lee Myung-bak, is now president of South Korea.

“It’s amazing,” says Jessica Hall, a senior associate with Los Angeles-based firm Restoration Design Group who specializes in watershed rehabilitation and runs a blog called Creek Freak. “The Cheong Gye Cheon is really the poster child of daylighting right now.”

Hall says she first heard the term “daylighting” in 2000, when she was in the process of mapping hidden streams and creeks in L.A. The notion of uncovering, or re-culverting waterways back to their original state was viewed by most engineers as a step backwards.

“I think it’s because, for years, engineers have been schooled to look at natural waterways as the enemy, or at least something to be controlled,” she says. “They’re often seen as a nuisance — a dangerous place for kids to play around, or a thing that gets dirty and polluted.”

Indeed, sanitation and public health concerns were the primary motivation during the late 1800s for covering up Toronto’s creeks — from Garrison to Taddle — as inhabitants upstream would often use them as open sewers, much to the irk of those living downstream.

But the infrastructure created decades ago to transform these naturally occurring waterways into controlled sewer systems is starting to wear down. Pipes are degrading and there is greater pressure on treatment facilities as the city’s population (and density) increases.

“By daylighting them, you’ll never have to deal with pipes again,” he says. “As soon as water starts interacting with soil and plants, an incredible amount of metals and other pollutants get removed, which means less work for sewage treatment plants. And it all happens naturally.”

The benefits are obvious to James Brown, a principal with Toronto architecture firm Brown and Storey. Back in 1994, his company was given $10,000 by the Waterfront Regeneration Trust to come up with a proposal and feasibility study for the daylighting of Garrison Creek. The final plans, which can still be viewed on the firm’s website, include a series of surface rainwater ponds along the Garrison’s winding path from Christie Pits, through Bickford Park and down to Trinity Bellwoods.

“We were trying to create a connected system, a network,” Brown says. “Imagine joining everything from Christie Pits all the way down to the new Fort York pedestrian bridge, where it ends, like a whole ravine system you could walk through, independent of the city above.”

Initially, there was a wave of community support for this project, and it was endorsed at the time by Councillor Dan Leckie, who was gaining recognition then for kick-starting the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and the Task Force to Bring Back the Don. But his attempts to convince others at City Hall that daylighting the Garrison was a worthy investment fell on deaf ears and, as Brown puts it, “we didn’t get the political support, so nothing happened.”

There are signs, however, that Toronto’s approach to managing both its natural and constructed waterways is shifting. The new Sherbourne Common, for instance, which is slated to become part of the East Bayfront community now being developed by Waterfront Toronto, boasts an artful display of fountains, waterfalls, ponds and streams that will eventually be fed by stormwater collected on-site — the features themselves, which include biofiltration beds and sedimentation, will filter the water before it returns to the lake, easing pressure on nearby treatment plants.

Michael Cook, the author of a blog about Toronto’s sewers and watersheds called Vanishing Point, believes this new park is a good sign of what’s to come. As he writes, it “celebrate[s] a hydrologic cycle that the last century-and-a-half of stormwater policy has done its best to bury and obfuscate from the public’s experience of urban living. We have spent a lot of money channelling water down into dark holes, never to be seen again; Sherbourne Common … brings it back up for us to see.”

As well, plans are moving ahead to naturalize the mouth of the Don River in order to re-establish wetlands that were lost 100 years ago while creating flood protection for more than 1,000 homes and businesses in the Port Lands, Leslieville and South Riverdale.

If these projects are successful, perhaps it won’t be long before Toronto officials start paying more attention to other rivers and creeks, including the hidden ones waiting for a chance to be in the spotlight — or at least the daylight — again. Fortunately, these waterways aren’t going anywhere.